Kid Icarus Uprising Chapter 14: Lightning Battle on 9.0 with base Skyscraper Club, 1 Counter use
Sakurai's video about handicap involvement for playtesters:
• Give Yourself a Handicap When Balancing Yo...
I was planning to wait on making this video, but Sakurai forces my hand. I'm uploading this to show that Sakurai didn't take his own advice nearly well enough when designing Kid Icarus Uprising.
Chapter 14 has a nasty room in the land battle that forces me to use a Power, the one I use being Counter, though by all indications, I may have actually not needed it anyway. In this room, basically entered at 9:53, you're dealing with a Nutski, 2 Zerts, and 2 continually respawning Trynamites. The Zerts are the nastiest part, although the Trynamites do try and contribute. What makes them sadistic? Their positioning. The Zerts and Trynamites are on the sides of the room, allowing them to easily flank the player and rampage that way. I'm surprised I was able to get around this without getting hopelessly trapped in the Zerts' electrical field, which if that happens, you're eating TONS of damage because of the Trynamites' self-destructing shots flying at you while you're stunlocked. It's ridiculous. And what's worse, you can't 1HKO the Zerts with ANY weapon type without an attack power boost (although technically, Babel Club can wipe them with a single one of its multi-hit attacks) unless you hit the weak spot, which the Zert can avoid exposing in favor of rushing at you and confounding you VERY quickly. Here's the context with that point: Skyscraper Club, even dealing 75% of its damage against Zerts because of Electric element shenanigans, still deals more single-hit damage against Zerts with any Shot than any other Club can manage.
Of course, apparently, the enemy force doesn't cover their heart side well. I went there on this run and the Zerts just went for rushing their lung side. I imagine that's why I took so little damage from this, barely taking a hit from a Trynamite self-destruct shot. If pre-programmed behavior to focus down on a given area regardless of where Pit is turns out to be the case, then I call Fake Difficulty, and definitely a case that doesn't work. The lightning lines in the air battle don't punish you so severely for failing to get depth perception going or memorize the actually safe part of the screen. This is an actual battle room, so losing so much health because you do something seemingly innocuous and don't have weapon modifiers to destroy the energy source quickly to fix that is unacceptable.
Oh yeah, and why do I use Counter? I was expecting to get hit, obviously, and I wanted to have something to work with, especially also expending less space than I would with Super Armor. In the process, I can call out Counter having only Black Hole protection in multiplayer as a reason to use it when not getting hit. Super Armor is at least expensive enough to avert this issue.
The followup rooms with the train cars are a usual show of 9.0's war crime durability. And I'm saying this with Skyscraper Club, while not having to worry about freaking enemies that resist Electric attacks. I will say that the Jitterthug and 2 Flages combination is potential nastiness to most weapon types even if you don't go after the train cars, which you shouldn't anyway. Everything after the rooms involving them is standard fare, for better or worse.
It's nice to be able to demonstrate how things go against Phosphora on 9.0 with base Skyscraper Club. Skyscraper Club being the tactically least mobile weapon type in the game limited my ability to draw Phosphora into being needlessly aggressive, so the 80% damage with Electric attacks was actually able to come into play and have it actually matter that I was using an electrical heavy melee weapon against a mobile electrokinesis smart-alec, but Phosphora's EX attack is still basically a free reward moment with the Neutral Shot for remembering about the Forces of Nature's mission statement, and her homing orbs still have 10 Shot Cancel and 60 Shot Stamina which is not exactly easy to get rid of with most weapon types, so Skyscraper Club has some form of defense.
As a note, I'll be wanting to make my videos from now on Members early access to at least get some money on the side. I doubt I'd get a lot, but every little bit would help.